Wholeness & Holiness Biblical Purity Curriculum

Since October 2011, my colleague Erik and I have been working to craft a youth- and young adult-friendly biblical purity curriculum out of Dr. Ritva Williams’ grant-funded research on the topic. The result of our collaboration is called Wholeness & Holiness. It’s an eight lesson curriculum that includes comprehensive leader guides, engaging student sheets, images, movie clips, and lots of other supplemental resources that can be utilized right out of the box.1

Ritva’s research sought to “reclaim” the word purity to encompass all of the oft-ignored aspects of biblical purity. These include temporary contact impurity, ingested impurity, how purity practices have changed throughout time, what you should or should not wear or tattoo on your body, etc. Now, just one of the eight lessons is about sex and sexuality, and this is intentional — the idea of biblical purity includes sex and sexuality but is by no means limited to it, regardless of what you may be lead to believe while browsing the aisles of your local Christian bookstore.

Needless to say, we are really excited about this resource and look forward to getting it into the hands of church leaders. And so (as you no doubt surmised by the graphic leading this post) we’re offering a 12 Days of Wholeness & Holiness sale starting on Christmas Day, which sale allows you to purchase the curriculum for as low as $25, which is over 55% off the full retail price.

Awesome. We have it and I’m just getting to thinking about how to use it. Have you had any response about “environments” in which it’s been shared? Like, Sunday mornings during a youth group time, or a parents and youth joint 8 week deal, etc.?

http://www.jakebouma.com Jake Bouma

Shaun: To my knowledge, W&H has only been used in “retreat” settings so far, but that’s likely because it’s just getting its feet, so to speak. Erik and I have used it to great effect at 9th grade retreats (Fri-Sat events) and have even used a truncated version with a group of 7th grade Pentecostal students. Now that I think about it, Erik actually went through some of W&H with a men’s Bible study group where the average age is 60 and the discussions were fruitful.

All that being said, we developed W&H to be flexible enough for use in multiple settings, and believe that an 8-week series would be a great use of the curriculum. Doing the curriculum with parents AND youth would also be very fruitful — we’ve received lots of feedback from retreat chaperones who have said things like “I learned more during this retreat than in any of my previous Bible studies!” (Which is not to stroke our ego, but more to point out the amount of “overlooked” material we cover).

Anyway… However you end up using W&H is probably wonderful. Please let me know how it works in your context and if you have any feedback for improvements, etc. Hope this helps!

JakeBouma.com is a weblog maintained since 2005 by Jake Bouma, an ecclesial junkie, aspiring polymath, and Hodgkin lymphoma survivor.